August Songs

And so we come to the end. Can't say it hasn't been fun.

Naming every single post after a song or a fragment of a song. I'd say it seemed like a good idea at the time but it wasn't my idea at all. It just happened, the way running jokes or habits happen, how they build up until it seems like they were always there, like they're laws of nature. They're not.

It's like the way now, when I go downstairs and make two coffees or two teas or two of any drink, really, the drink doesn't matter, it's not about the drink, don't confuse me. It's like the way I have to clink the two mugs together every time before I carry them upstairs, even though they don't clink, they don't make a good sound, sometimes, just a dull noise.

If I didn't do it, though, bad things would happen. What bad things? I don't know. Mrs Bhagpuss asked me that yesterday and I said I don't know, maybe we'd have black snow. Then we both thought how cool would that be? So maybe it wouldn't be so bad. I still do it, though, and I can't tell you when it started or why.

Habits. They break. This one's breaking now. Stopping. Oh, not the songs and lyrics for titles. That's never going to stop. Just the having to be those. I've wasted too many good titles already I could have used because they weren't songs. A title should be able to be just a title and now it will.

Okay, that's all clear, then. Let's crack on.

July Song - Kah - Oh, that's good, isn't it? Kah, though. Who are they? No idea. The things you find when you look, eh?

August Song - The Autumn Defense - Yes, cheating. Ought to be at the end or in the next roundup only there won't be a next roundup and I don't want the last one ever to end on something as bland as this. It's very sixties. Not a patch on Kah but nice enough, I guess. Let's just get it out of the way now and get to the good stuff.

Blaugust Backup Plan - Backup Plan -  Lysa May - Back on track! Oh, and isn't this gorgeous? Can you believe the first three songs I've used can barely scrape a hundred views between them? This one has twenty-eight. Twenty-eight! What's wrong with the world? Don't anyone go thinking just because this is the last of these title posts we won't be doing something else like this every month. More than. I'm just freeing up some headroom so I can share the best finds not just the ones that fit...

 

... or just whatever I feel like sharing, like this by Plested. Good video, good tune. Why leave it out?

Let's Go Round Again - Bull By The Horns - kd lang and the Reclines -Not fond of a capital letter, that kd lang. She and ee cummings both. Is it just me or is this Chuck Berry's Brown Eyed Handsome Man with different words?

Baby, You're Far Too Clean - No Blue Skies - Lloyd Cole - So many of Lloyd's songs sound like he wrote them the day after a bad break-up that was all his fault. Too many for his peace of mind but never enough for ours. Never enough. But can he really have had that bad a time, romantically? I kind of doubt it. Not with that hair.

Hurry Up And Wait - Little Charlie and the Nightcats - I was, of course, thinking of Blondie's Sunday Girl when this popped into my head but that's a lyric and this is a song. Also a blues jam of colossal proportions. I used to lap this stuff up when I was in my late teens, only I liked it double speed.

Launch Day Brownout - Brownout - Xmas Emo - I'd be lying if I said I knew what this was. Lofi hip-hop? My best guess. The lyric calls out D&D at one point. What's that about? And what's with the name? Xmas Emo? Excuse me? Comments are turned off on YouTube so no help there. Haunting, isn't it? I do like a mystery.

We Are Explorers - Cut Copy - I think "We Are Explorers" would make a much better band name than "Cut Copy". Pretty much anything would. They should swap. 

How's That For First Impressions? - Depreston - Courtney Barnett - I think that's the official video for Depreston, which might have been the first Courtney Barnett song I ever heard, but I'm certain sure it's not the video I saw then. I think that was a live show somewhere, maybe a TV recording. Whatever it was, it was way less annoying. Australia looks really boring , doesn't it? So flat. I guess that's kind of the point but still. Who wants to watch that?.

 

Hubble Bubble - Manfred Mann - I left a note to myself about this one. It said "gonna need to edit it to get rid of the first song and intro". So I have. Only thing is, I couldn't be bothered to download the whole thing, load it into Movie Maker, trim it, upload it to my YouTube channel and link to that. So I tried a few online YouTube editors. The first two didn't work but this one did. Or it looks like it did. It's greyed out in draft but looks okay in Preview but you can't run video in Preview so who knows? I guess I'll find out when l I publish.

Weekenders On Our Own (It's Such Fun) - Perfect Day - Lou Reed - It's cover time! Everyone thinks they can do this one and hardly anyone can. I love Caro Emerald's version. The boopy-doop jazz arrangement coupled with her over-articulated accent is mesmerically inappropriate. The ending is demented for a given, exceptionally low, value of mania.

Perfect Day is a love song. A love song to heroin. Not everyone seems to get that but St Vincent does, although she makes a better case here for it being a love song to valium and creme de menthe, which was my late night tipple of choice once upon a time. What with that dress and whatever it is the piano player is wearing, this wins the prize for most distracting visuals in live performance by two people basically doing not anything odd at all. That guy coughing at the end needs to think about his life choices, too.

Andrew Bird, fast becoming a friend of this blog, manages to render the whole thing virtually unrecognizeable, always a win with a cover. That's Matt Berninger of the National on vocals. He seems to turn up here a lot too. Maybe I should listen to one of his records one day.

Somewhat surprisingly, Lou's favorite cover of this song was by Duran Duran. Given his famously contrarian nature you might guess that was some kind of ironic joke but no, he totally meant it. Lou said Simon Le Bon sang the lyric the way he would have, if only he'd been able. I love Duran Duran's covers, of which there are many, although some of them don't really work. *Ahem* 911 Is A Joke *Ahem*. This is genuinely magnificent, though. Lou was right, as usual..

There's also a version by Pavarotti but I haven't worked up the nerve to listen to it yet.

Cause Me Confusion - Confusion - Nouvelle Vague - If it's covers you want (It is covers you want, isn't it? I did hear that right?) you could do a lot worse than Nouvelle Vague. Their brand of smoky bossa nova jive doesn't seem to inspire the outrage it once did, when they were working their way thgrough the post-punk songbook back in the nineties. I guess we're used to that kind of thing, now.

Inconvenience Regretted - Jaggy - Alright, this is first for the blog. Punjabi rap. Enough with the Eastern European hip-hop. Let's go somewhere fresh. I can't even remember what I put into Lyrics.com to get this. It's really 90s. I like it. I have no clue what he's rapping about but he does say "inconveniences" in English right at the end.

Level Up - Interlunium feat. Anette Chanel - You would be amazed how many songs there are called "Level Up" but none of the ones I listened to were as totally on point as this one:

"Inside this world of fantasy
We can all level up, yeah, we can all level up!
We're gonna get to where we wanna be
We can all level up, yeah, we can level, level up! Up!"

Seriously, that has to be our theme tune, doesn't it?

Black Cat Moan - Clara Smith & Her Five Black Kittens - There are countless versions of this on YouTube but who's going to pass up a chance to link Clara Smith and Her Five Black Kittens? Not me, that's for sure.

Thirty-Six Hours - John Cooper-Clarke - JCC, always a favorite around here. Mrs Bhagpuss quotes something by him almost daily. Usually something sweary. This is a roiling, swaggering, spitting tirade with the Doctor on a rolling boil throughout. JCC was always at his best with Martin Hannett although he's matured nicely in latter years. He's settled for being a national treasure and he deserves it, just for still being alive after the amount of drugs he's taken. Allegedly. Do we still need to say that?

Get It Right! - Charlotte Jane -This is modern pop, isn't it? Do I hear a little Laura Marling in there, somewhere? Does that make it folk-pop? Is there any such thing? Oh, who cares. It's good.

Words - the Monkees/the Leaves - I prefer the Monkees version, which is kind of a cover and kind of not. It was written, I believe specifically for them, by their regular writers, Boyce and Hart, but it was recorded and released first by the Leaves, the garage band that also beat Jimi Hendrix to Hey Joe. How exactly that all came about I haven't been able (or tried) to find out. I own an album by the Leaves, though, if that helps. On vinyl.

That's Motivation - David Bowie - Look, I love Bowie as much as the next person (unless the next person happens to be Mrs Bhagpuss) but he didn't get everything right, did he? 

Tell Me Where To Go - I am not a woman, I’m a god - Halsey - I just fucking love it when I can get something absolutely brand new into one of these things. From Halsey's new album, video posted to YouTube just the day before I grabbed it for the title of a post about DCUO. Probably not what Halsey would have ch9osen but who knows? Maybe they play. They're getting better and better, too. I should get the album. I think I'll wishlist it.

The Lonely Financial Zone - Lonely Financial Zone - Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers - I thought this was supremely weird when I first heard it while I was still at school. This and the one about the Government Center. I didn't realize he was literally just writing about what he saw every day, wandering around his home town, Boston. I'm not sure it doesn't make it even weirder, now I know.

Have Horse, Will Travel - Have Love Will Travel - the Sonics /thee Headcoatees- A fantastic double-header to end this long-running series with a bang. Nothing beats the Sonics but thee Headcoatees version is storming. Also, I loved that moment when everyone was putting a few extra "Es" on everything. It literally just occured to me to wonder if it was a drug pun but then I remembered Leee Black Childers. He came before all that lovey-dovey stuff.

And so we leave them, the song titles dressed up as post titles. Make no mistake, they will be back. They're not going anywhere. They're just going to pick their moments from now on.

As for big, portmanteau music posts. Oh, yes, there will be more of those.